Full post: Exact budgets of video-game productions can be tough to corroborate (more transparency from publishers would be nice!) but the numbers I’ve heard floating around AAA game dev these days are $300 million or more — sometimes much more! — which I think helps explain the current state of the industry
To address some frequently asked questions:
- These are US and Canada productions. If you’re wondering why game X cost so much less, it was probably made elsewhere
- These budgets are almost entirely dev salaries + overheard and have nothing to do with executive compensation (which is mostly stock)
Piggybacking on your comments towards new world, Amazon spent 1b developing their own engine for the game before they started the game. MMOs being what they are, not being the best profit generators in the industry, it was doomed to fail with that kind of price tag before even releasing the game.
I can’t speak to the scam stuff, but watching the dumpster fire that was that game was some excellent schadenfreude. Expecting to be able to compete with the MMO heavy weights that have been developing for 20 years and the type of rabid content eating gamers that play them, is just an insanely market deaf thing to do, in my opinion.
As a disclaimer, I didn’t play it, just watched it burn from the outside.